March 2020: Dr. Anthony Fauci talks with Dr Jon LaPook about Covid-19

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Aunche · 2021-01 · Recommendation

Fauci was never dishonest. That was Trump trying to shift the blame to him. Watch the original clip: [VIDEO] He literally said that the reason he is advising against masks was because he was worried about shortages.

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maxerickson · 2022-12 · Reference

The contemporaneous statements often mentioned shortages and preserving masks for healthcare workers. This Fauci interview in early March has him saying that he thinks masks aren't necessary at the time but also saying that he isn't against people wearing them (both things together at ~1 minute if you are impatient): [VIDEO] This CDC transcript doesn't talk a lot about PPE, but it talks about directing it to healthcare workers that are at higher risk: [LINK] I'm sure there's stuff that looks worse if you go back through the 6 weeks previous to that, but early March is when things started to really happen in the US (I remember making a relatively large shopping trip that felt like it put me on the cautious side of things, and then the next week I started working from home). There's a lot of people saying that the government was saying not to wear masks, which is subtly different from saying that people don't need to wear masks, or that masks won't benefit most people. The surgeon general was out there saying they weren't effective for the general public, which is bad but still different from saying not to wear them. And I'm not sure it's entirely fair to attribute his comms failures to the CDC (they might have had a hand in it, who knows, but they don't control the surgeon general). Given how well people do with their masks (I still regularly see people wearing low quality masks incorrectly!), it seems true enough that they should be secondary to things like social distancing.

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thedorkknight · 2022-09 · Reference

>From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next. Which is exactly what you would expect to happen as we get new data on anything new. The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process. Side note, but just a reminder that Fauci NEVER said "masks don't work", as much as this gets repeated on social media. He said that they prevent infected people from spreading it to others and did not recommend that everyone wear them: [VIDEO] And when further data came out about asymptomatic transmission, the recommendations changed. Side note 2: "hug a chinese" and "vaccinated people don't spread COVID" were both from politicians, not the medical or scientific communities. I found plenty of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels from actual epidemiologists and virologists (such as "this week in virology") who did not say such things. Unfortunately Americans don't really care enough to distinguish between "science communicated by politicians" and "science communicated by scientists". After 2020 and watching as people working in relevant fields - like the podcast above, or "your local epidemiologist" - just got straight-up ignored by COVID deniers, I'm not even sure most of the public even knows how to look up "communication by scientists"...

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